As union leaders and activists lay the groundwork for reforming federal labor laws, many are winning changes in state and local legislation in support of workers’ rights and power. Some of these laws help workers who are not covered by federal collective bargaining laws, such as state employees. Other laws, including local living wage ordinances, raise workers’ wages in the face of a federal minimum wage that has not been increased since 1997 and help build coalitions that support workers’ efforts to win a voice on the job.

“When the national government balks” at promoting workers’ rights and lifting workers’ wages, “state and local governments act,” says David Olson, a political scientist at the University of Washington and founder of its Center for Labor Studies. In the future, progressive-minded federal government leaders likely will turn to states, cities and counties for innovative models for improving the lives of working families, Olson says, noting that decades ago, Wisconsin political leaders passed minimum wage and unemployment compensation laws that President Franklin D. Roosevelt copied. “Federal officials look to cities and states for models,” he says.

Here are some sample strategies of state and local union activists working for new routes to workers’ rights.

	Signing up: Houston is among more than 100 cities and counties where union activists and their allies have championed living wage laws.

Living Wage Ordinances:
Building Coalitions for the Future

With the buying power of the federal minimum wage plummeting and municipal governments privatizing jobs by giving lucrative contracts to companies that pay poverty wages, union and community activists have sought creative strategies to lift wages for workers struggling to make ends meet. Starting in Baltimore in 1994 and building strength over the past eight years, local union leaders and allies launched more than 100 living wage ordinances nationwide.

Activists tailor the laws to local economic and political circumstances, but all the proposals are based on the principle that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund poverty-level jobs. Some living wage ordinances include other measures, such as worker retention, collective bargaining, opt-outs, antiprivatization and labor peace agreements, leading activists to dub them “living wage plus” ordinances. Such community campaigns catalyze community coalitions to help workers win fairness on the job after living wage campaigns succeed.

In Michigan, activists in 14 cities won living wage ordinances. The movement began in the Motor City in 1998 when the Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO, several UAW locals and the community group ACORN spearheaded a local initiative campaign. In November 1998, more than 80 percent of Detroit voters approved the measure, which requires city service contractors or recipients of city financial assistance worth $50,000 or more to pay employees a wage equivalent to the federal poverty line for a family of four—$9.05 an hour or $11.31 an hour if no health benefits are provided. The ordinance also requires companies to reach out to Detroit residents to fill any new jobs created as a result of the contract or assistance granted by the city.

What began with a coordinated effort to get signatures for a ballot measure has solidified into a permanent coalition that mobilizes regularly for workers’ rights on the job. Living wage allies from Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice, for example, have joined in a rally for five workers recently fired at The Atheneum hotel, where workers are trying to form unions with Operating Engineers Local 547 and Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 24. The coalition also is helping with a first contract campaign at a radio station where workers joined American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. “Living wage ordinances have a positive effect on building coalitions that help with other issues,” says Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO spokesman Shawn Ellis.

Since the initial victory in Detroit, 13 more cities in Michigan (most in Detroit suburbs) have passed living wage ordinances. Big Business interests and their allies in political power have taken notice: In the past legislative session, anti-worker politicians tried to ban localities from passing living wage ordinances. Leaders of the Michigan State AFL-CIO sprang into action, using their long-time effectiveness in Lansing and mobilizing their statewide network of activists to prevent a ban. The growing living wage movement “has brought the labor movement together, especially at the state level,” says Ellis.

The Freedom of Workers to Choose a Voice at Work

Faced with unfair working conditions, rising health care costs and gaping inequality in their communities, workers more than ever want to form unions to have a voice on the job. But they face a fierce fight at the workplace:  “With ferocity and regularity, employers block the freedom of working men and women to make their own decision about forming a union,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council said in February, launching an unprecedented new campaign to support the freedom of workers to choose a voice at work. The union leaders pledged to radically change the climate for organizing with four broad strategies: (1) publicly engage community and political support for organizing, (2) educate and mobilize current union members and allies to fight for workers’ freedom to form unions, (3) win workers’ rights initiatives at the state and local levels and (4) build support in the U.S. Congress to reform federal laws guaranteeing workers’ freedom to organize.  “We must bring about nothing short of a revolution in culture and attitudes, and it will require a revolutionlike commitment by our unions,” council members stated. America@work will devote a series of articles to exploring each of these strategies in depth, beginning with state and local legislative campaigns. By sharing their successes, union activists nationwide can bolster their mutual efforts. Helping workers win a voice on the job “is the central moral challenge for today’s union leaders,” the council said. “The need is urgent. Our response must be similarly urgent.”

Helping Workers Retain Union Jobs

Under federal labor law, nothing prevents state and local governments from contracting with private companies to provide a range of services—everything from janitorial services to clean public buildings to picking up recyclable trash. There’s also no federal law addressing the status of union workers if local governments change contractors. Union workers can lose their jobs along with such hard-won union benefits as decent wages and health insurance when local governments replace contractors—unless there’s a worker retention ordinance on the books.

In 1994, local union leaders in the District of Columbia won a campaign to give workers employed by contractors a measure of job security. Today, if a contract for food service, janitorial or health care workers changes hands, the new contractor must retain the workers for 90 days. At the end of that period, contractors are required to evaluate workers’ job performance—and if it is satisfactory, they must offer the workers a posi tion. Activists lobbied local lawmakers and walked door-to-door in key council districts talking to voters to build support for passing the ordinance.

	Community support: San José, Calif., union activists make the connection between living wages and workers' rights with an areawide agreement that includes a worker retention provision.

San José, Calif., union leaders included a worker retention provision in their living wage proposal, which the city council passed in November 1998. Since then, hundreds of workers employed by companies providing services for the city have retained their jobs, providing their families with some degree of security. They include parking attendants who are members of SEIU Local 1877, food service workers at the Mineta San José International Airport who are members of Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 19 and Operating Engineers Local 40 workers who handle recycling for the city.

The San José law also includes a service disruption–labor peace provision to prevent organizing campaigns from disrupting important government projects and services. Contractors must give assurances against disruptions due to union–management disagreements through such efforts as card-check and no-strike agreements. With community efforts focused on workers’ issues, city council members and employers today often cooperate with union and community leaders in ensuring workers’ rights—even if the contractors are not officially covered by the ordinance. For example, 200 members of Teamsters Local 350 kept their high-quality union jobs when a retention agreement—separate from the ordinance—was included in their contract.

Union activists must pay as much attention to how they win pro-worker policies as they do to what they win, says Amy Dean, executive officer of the Labor Council of South Bay [Calif.] AFL-CIO. Union leaders need to “build the political program and community support” for efforts such as San José’s ordinance on living wages, labor peace and worker retention, she says. “That way,” Dean says, “workers harvest the victory for a much longer time.”

Strong Public Support for Unions

Public approval of unions is the strongest in decades, with two-thirds of adults saying they approve of unions—a level not seen since 1967, according to a recent poll for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates. Among nonunion workers who aren’t managers, 47 percent say they would vote for a union in their workplace, up from 42 percent in January 2001. But in the face of this growing support, it is also clear that the public has little knowledge of employers’ aggressive attacks against workers trying to exercise their freedom to form unions. More than 75 percent of those surveyed say employers should take no position when workers want to hold a union election, but only 44 percent say they think employers oppose workers’ efforts to join unions. In reality, nearly all employers use unfair tactics to oppose workers’ freedom to form unions, according to Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner. The public strongly disapproves of employer tactics to intimidate workers, such as requiring supervisors to urge employees to vote against the union and holding mandatory, closed-door anti-union meetings—but even union members far underestimate how often employers deploy these unscrupulous methods. For example, only 20 percent of union members surveyed thought employers require workers to attend anti-union meetings, which they do 92 percent of the time. In February, the AFL-CIO Executive Council passed a resolution to “educate, engage and mobilize literally millions of union members and people of conscience” to expose employers’ campaign against workers and support state and local legislation that supports organizing.

A Voice for Public Employees

Professors at Eastern Washington University in Cheney have had a voice on the job with the Washington Federation of Teachers (WFT), an AFT affiliate, for six years. Their counterparts at Central Washington University in Ellensburg 130 miles away voted for the union, but they couldn’t get the administration to bargain—and they were among many such employees at Washington’s public four-year universities who struggled with stagnant salaries and swelling teaching loads. Until spring 2002, employer resistance to negotiating a contract was legal because faculty members at four-year public universities did not have legally enforceable collective bargaining rights. Administrators at six campuses could each decide whether they wanted to bargain a contract.

	From America@work, May 2003.

Thousands of public employees and graduate teaching employees in Washington were in similar predicaments, stymied by state laws that did not fully respect their right to a voice at work. Fighting back, the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and several key affiliates mounted a comprehensive legislative campaign, pushing for a package of laws that would give all three groups of workers full collective bargaining rights. Leaders and activists first laid the groundwork for victory with a savvy strategy to engage union members in electing a worker-friendly candidate to a crucial state legislative seat. Before that victory, the state legislature was strangled by a partisan tie and activists weren’t able to move pro-worker legislation for several years.

The collective bargaining victory “was a very exciting win,” says Sandra Schroeder, WFT president, who has contacts among activist professors at all six state university campuses where as many as 8,000 workers could join the union. Schroeder says the key to success is joint union action. “The labor community put their whole weight behind all of the bills,” instead of each union working on its narrow concern, she says. “That was a great success in itself. People ought to join in coalitions.”

Within months of the law’s passage, public employees were celebrating organizing victories: A group of 111 Head Start workers in Spokane joined the Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME last fall and shortly will begin bargaining a contract—which can include such economic issues as wages and benefits as a result of the new state law.

AFSCME activists are now in the midst of several organizing campaigns at some large state agencies, deploying member action teams, made up of a captain who distributes information to 10 co-workers and mobilizes them for rallies and other events.

“We know what the families and the children need,” says Theresa Sullivan, one of the workers. “Our program is growing and we want to make sure that the staff who work with the kids have a voice.”

“I hope our successful efforts in Washington state underscore the importance of union political and legislative action in growing the union movement,” says Rick Bender, president of the Washington State Labor Council. “Given the hostile anti-union policies of the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, it is more important than ever for unions to fight on the state and local level for policies that remove hurdles for state and local workers to organize. Those efforts can produce immediate measurable results.”

For more information about state and local legislative Voice@Work initiatives, contact Nancy Schiffer, AFL-CIO associate general counsel, at 202-637-5336 or nschiffe@aflcio.org.